RankShift: In-Database Detection and Explanation of Categorical Shifts

Continuous monitoring of generative AI systems requires detecting distribution shifts in the unstructured data they ingest and generate. Existing monitoring methods typically control false alarms by requiring the discrepancy measure used to detect shifts to be pre-specified. However, for unstructured data, pre-specification creates a sensitivity--breadth trade-off: a narrowly defined measure is sensitive to the anticipated shift but may miss unexpected changes, whereas a broadly defined measure may detect a wider range of shifts but with reduced sensitivity. Although adaptively hypothesizing the shift direction can overcome this limitation, such data-dependent adaptation generally invalidates conventional false-alarm guarantees. We reconcile adaptivity with statistical validity through testing-by-betting, reframing sequential changepoint detection as a betting game in which the bettor continually updates its hypothesized shift direction, or witness function, as new observations arrive. We introduce asymptotic e-detectors, which approximate the pre-change distribution using a calibration set of size $m$, and prove that they asymptotically control the average run length to a false alarm as $m$ increases. Empirically, calibration sets as small as $m=30$ provide effective control. We then develop adaptive monitoring strategies ranging from black-box bettors that learn from embeddings to interpretable bettors based on LLM-proposed concepts. Across three real-world datasets, including data from a clinical AI scribe deployment, adaptive monitors detect shifts faster than fixed monitors at the same false-alarm level. Further, when the true shifts are sparse and interpretable, LLM-concept monitors provide the fastest and most interpretable detection, while also guiding root-cause diagnosis for complex shifts.

Intrusion detectors can confidently misclassify attacks that were not seen during training. Human review can correct these errors, but only a limited number of cases can be checked. Uncertainty-based review may overlook confident errors, while anomaly scores alone do not show whether changing the review plan will correct more errors. We introduce PairAudit to find overlooked errors and improve review under a fixed budget. Its graph tokens capture prediction patterns across connected nodes. Rather than building another predictor through feature aggregation, PairAudit uses unusual relational patterns to uncover potential errors in existing predictions. Human feedback then helps decide whether these findings justify changing review priorities. Experiments across security tasks show that PairAudit corrects more errors on average than uncertainty-based review, including more errors on unseen attacks. These gains account for all review costs and do not require retraining the detector.

System-generated logs underpin security monitoring, yet their rigid template-based format hinders both automated analysis and human comprehension. We present NLLog (Natural-Language Log), a lightweight pipeline that deterministically rewrites parsed templates into WHO-WHAT-SEVERITY sentences, pools them with term-frequency-inverse-document-frequency weighting, classifies sessions with tree ensembles, and back-projects evidence with TreeSHAP for analyst review. On Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and Blue Gene/L (BGL) corpora, NLLog exceeds two reproduced matched-protocol baselines; across HDFS, BGL, and the AIT Alert Data Set, it sustains low false-positive rates with commodity-hardware latency suitable for security operations center triage. Coverage, sparse-versus-dense, faithfulness, and adversarial ablations show that fallback sufficiency is corpus-dependent, that an enrollment-time coverage check can surface refinement requirements before deployment, and that an auditable deterministic rewrite combined with lightweight dense encoding provides a measurable representation layer for log-anomaly detection and triage.